EQ Hypothesis

Post Reply New Topic

I'm not sure if I'm just beating a dead horse at this point (I wrote this over a year ago while isolated from society at large), but here is a thing.

I noticed most of the questions on the Q test relate to cognitive empathy, with a few correlated to emotional empathy. According to SBC, girls score higher than boys on average, and aspies score lower than average, and he concluded that means autism is an extreme male brain. The conclusion is of course preposterous as this is only one axis being measured, but my hypothesis is that a question by question analysis would show the test does not support the conclusion that autism manifests as extreme male on the empathy axis. My more specific hypothesis is 1. on questions relating to emotional empathy, girls generally score higher than boys 2. on questions relating to cognitive empathy, boys score more similar to girls 3. on questions relating to cognitive empathy, aspies score lower than neurotypical controls and 4. but aspies tend not to score lower on questions relating to emotional empathy. The following is an example of scores which would support my hypothesis, with the questions relating to emotional empathy on the left of the bar, and the questions relating to cognitive empathy on the right.

Typical Boy Score: [] [] [x] [] [x] | [x] [x] [] [x] [] [x] [x] [x] [x] [] 9/15
Typical Girl Score: [x] [] [x] [x] [x] | [x] [] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [x] [] [x] 12/15
Typical Aspie Score: [] [x] [] [x] [x] | [] [x] [x] [] [x] [] [x] [] [] [] 7/15

On the actual EQ test there is a far smaller ratio of questions that relate to emotional empathy, so the effect would be much more pronounced.